In the production of made to order clothing, one of the key tasks is to provide the information used to cut each piece of material into the right size. The gathering of this information has traditionally been the task of a tailor and its reliability is dependent on years of training and experience held by these highly skilled artisans.
Using a tailor, however, does not always suit potential customers. It is, first of all, necessary to get to one in the first place and this may not be possible or convenient. Perhaps a particularly relevant consideration presently is the rapid expansion of remote purchasing, in which use of for example the internet has led many customers away from the traditional approach to specialised services or even high street shopping. Customer expectations are changing in many segments and the field of clothing is no exception.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,163,007 is disclosed an arrangement in which a computer is used to generate cutting data from information supplied by a customer and measurements taken by a third party. This third party need not be a skilled tailor and can for example be a shop assistant. The computer uses the information supplied to generate the cut data while at the same time compensating for errors which might otherwise creep in from inconsistencies between sets of measurements supplied by different measuring parties or inaccuracies in the measurements supplied by the customer. This scheme reduces the skill level required of the person gathering the measurements and therefore increases the number and convenience of places where the customer can be measured. It will be noted, however, that it is still necessary to have some interaction with a third party and this scheme is therefore not ideal for implementation using for example home internet access.
Schemes have been proposed which measure the customer using a technical aid, such as those in EP 0554647, EP 0933728 and WO 95/04975. In schemes such as these, it is necessary to provide complex and expensive apparatus at the point of ordering and then to induce customers to visit and be measured, photographed or scanned as the case may be.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,680,528 is disclosed a digital dressing room used to produce clothes from customer measurements. Those measurements are used to classify the individual by body type and reference is made to a database to obtain cut data based on the individual's particular shape. The customer inputs to this system are bust, waist, hips and height. These measurements are all done with a tape measure and need quite a degree of skill to get right. A similar scheme is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,930,769 which, in common with U.S. Pat. No. 5,680,528, still relies on accurate measurement information and their successful implementation may be compromised by a lack of skill of many potential customers to self-measure.
Generally, conventional remote order systems have a high return rate of clothes from dissatisfied customers—typically of the order 30%.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an improved arrangement and method for the production of made to order clothing.
It is a further object of the present invention to improve the suitability of clothing designs based on personal data input to a made to order clothing system.